George Leslie Hunter

Sale, Christie's Scotland, 8th December 1988, lot 305

STRUCTURE The canvas has been relined. There are a few very minor and isolated signs of craquelure to some of the thicker areas of impasto, only visible upon close inspection; otherwise the work appears in excellent overall condition. ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT There are one or two minor flecked retouchings about the edges and a few minor flecks in isolated places across the canvas. FRAME Held in a gilt composite frame.
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In Still Life with Fruit and Roses in a Wine Glass we are presented with a fascinating example from an important moment of transition in Hunter's stylistic development. This vibrant composition highlights the profound impact that the seventeenth-century masters of still life painting such as Willem Kalf and Jan Davidsz de Heem and the eighteenth-century painter Jean-Simeon Chardin had on Hunter's early work.  Hunter viewed paintings by these masters at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Glasgow and the McManus Art Gallery in Dundee, and in a letter to his close friend Matthew Justice he wrote of his strong interest in their work.  Hunter painted still lifes consistently throughout his career, but his works from 1914 to 1919 such as Still Life with Roses, Fruit and Wine Glasses (Sotheby's, Hopetoun House, 24 April 2006, lot 153) show a particular influence of Kalf and Chardin through the realistic representation of tightly arranged scenes of flowers, fruit and glassware on predominantly dark coloured backgrounds.

In this painting, Hunter has kept the dark background of his earlier work and a still life composition inspired by the Dutch masters, but he has moved dramatically away from the muted, realistic palette that defined his paintings of the 1910s. Here Hunter does not attempt a naturalistic still life but rather uses intense Fauve-inspired colours on an almost black background to explore the visual space and the relationship between the objects within the composition. Space is defined purely by colour, with a simple streak of bright yellow along the foreground indicating the edge of the table and the mere outline of glass to indicate the object holding the flower arrangement. The roses themselves are not complete, and instead are reduced to abstracted swirls of vibrant white, pink, and yellow that burst forcibly from the background. 

Hunter retained the brilliant colours of this work in his later paintings, but by the mid-1920s he predominantly painted his still life paintings with lighter backgrounds to further explore the relationship between form and colour. This painting then represents a remarkable moment when Hunter was combining his deep interest in the seventeenth-century masters with his developing interest in vivid colours that would gain him the reputation as one of the most influential British still life painters of the twentieth century.